NNTP feed.

Tue Sep 5 23:58:55 UTC 2006

Thus spake "Greg Boehnlein" <damin at nacs.net>
> I came to much the same conclusion several years ago, when we finally
> decommissioned our NNTP Servers and out-sourced the service to an
> outside company. Running an NNTP server was a full-time job, and the
> 500 or so people that used it didn't generate enough revenue for us to
> continue managing it inside.

That seems to be consensus among ISPs: there just aren't enough users 
today to justify the cost of hiring a full-time news admin, deal with 
abuse and customer service issues, and pay for the storage space for 
8TB/day of content.

OTOH, it might be doable if you didn't carry the alt.binaries groups; 
those account for well over 90% of the bytes on usenet today, and 
virtually all of the complainers.  If your customers want the binaries 
groups, you can easily point them to a dozen different commercial news 
providers that do carry them -- and have the economy of scale needed to 
turn a profit.

Another option is to run a caching-only news server, provided you can 
find a willing upstream.  This will save you most of the bandwidth if 
you don't have many users, though again excluding binaries may be needed 
to cut down on the whiney pirates.

(Besides, all the binaries on usenet are available via BitTorrent 
somewhere anyways; NNTP does not make a good piracy protocol from a 
technical perspective, only from an anonymity one)

S

Stephen Sprunk         "God does not play dice."  --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723         "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS        dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking 